Practical and deployment issues to be considered in regenerator placement and operation of translucent optical networks

In translucent optical networks, the signal will remain in the optical domain as long as possible and will be regenerated only when its quality falls below a threshold or a wavelength contention has to be resolved. In these networks a limited number of regenerators are placed at a selected set of nodes. As OEO regenerators are expensive, the problem of regenerator site selection is of paramount importance in the design of cost-efficient translucent optical networks. In this paper we discuss the practical and deployment issues and metrics that need to be considered in regenerator site selection/placement algorithms and control plane issues in the operation of translucent optical networks. We feel that unless the practical issues are considered by the algorithms and appropriate extensions to control plane protocols are developed and standardized, it is difficult to realize dynamically reconfigurable translucent optical networks.